Sarlock
by Anneannah
Summary: OMG, Liek, hearts 3's BC, like 5eva, wich is mor than 4eva. Please do not read this.


Everyone said that Monday mornings were meant to be the worst part of any day of the week. But there were wrong. Tuesdays were always the hardest to get through. Mondays were never too bad, still living off the high from the weekend before, so much easier now that everything was going right. Mondays, where just a glance at your phone for a new text message, or just a memory of Friday night could make you smile. Wednesdays, too, were uplifting in a way – half way to the next weekend, half way to truly being home again. Thursday's weren't even difficult, barely rated on calendar as something to care about. Just one more day until it's all over. And Friday's, Friday's were filled with secret smiles, a low-level sort of excitement, anticipation building, counting down the minutes until you could see him again.

Tuesdays, though. There was nothing good to be said about Tuesdays. The buzz from the weekend has gone and the next weekend is still too far away to seem real. But even if Tuesdays were just like any other day of the week, they would still be disappointing, because none of them would ever be able to beat that first one. All it took was a cold morning, a hot coffee, a small patch of slippery ice and a kind stranger to change everything.

But I digress.

It all started one cold English winter, on an otherwise uninteresting Tuesday.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Everything was going wrong.

Everything.

Maybe that sounded a little dramatic or over the top, but it felt like the end of the world.

The receptionist had quit the day before to pursue her life ambition – apparently tap dancing was what she had wanted to do her whole life, and after seeing some commercial on late night TV, had decided that a career in dance was for her. Never mind the fact that she was a 32 year old single mother with four kids who had never danced before in her life.

But that's another story.

Sarah was the kind of girl who supported the ambitions of others, no matter how far-fetched or ridiculous they seemed. As a 24-year-old art graduate in a world where even degrees didn't guarantee career progression or even jobs at all, it would have been seriously hypocritical not to. In fact, to be perfectly honest, if Alice had waited just another two days to quit to pursue her rather ridiculous ambition, Sarah would have quite happily waved her off with good wishes, a bottle of wine and maybe even a small bunch of flowers. Two days later and she would have even tried to keep the sarcastic commentary and unwarranted life advice internal. Probably would have held off on the eye-rolling and 'are-you-serious?' kind of incredulity until it was just her and friends over drinks on a Friday night.

As it stood, it was two days too early, it was the middle of an English winter, the heating in her apartment had broken down a week before and she'd lost her phone. _And_ to top it all off, her favorite flamboyantly hipster alleyway coffee stop - which had been conveniently located just half a block from her tiny fourth floor studio apartment – had been snowed in and she hadn't been able to get her morning fix for days. There was something about instant coffee that just didn't do it, no matter how much corner store caramel syrup was added to it. Seriously, at this point it probably wasn't even coffee anymore, just slightly granulated caramel syrup. No matter how sweet you like your coffee, that sickly orange-brown color is not a color that coffee should be. And unless it's traditional Greek or traditional Turkish coffee, the spoon should never, under any circumstances be able to stand up on its own.

You might, at this point, suggest that Sarah should probably go out and buy a proper coffee machine or even just tolerable instant coffee (if there is even such a thing) the next time the snow lets up and the stores reopen. You would be wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. Don't get me wrong, coffee machines are a great idea.

For anyone else.

Caffeine addiction is a serious thing. Or at least, a thing that Sarah seriously has. The great, and somewhat terrible thing about instant coffee is that it can only be so strong. Something about health risks and heart attacks that mean that companies can't keep upping the strength of the coffee past a certain point. Apparently they'd done that in the United States in the eighties and a few (dozen) heart attacks later decided it was a bad idea. Or, well, the families complained and filed law suits and the FDA cried a little and declared that all coffee produced in the United States had a limit on how much caffeine it could possess per hundred grams. And the rest of the world learnt from the mistakes of their neighbors and kept the caffeine levels in instant coffee within medically sound limits.

But I think we're getting a little off topic again.

Caffiene. Addiction. Sarah.

So, yes, coffee machines are a wonderful thing. But, while a single bag of coffee grounds could only contain so much caffeine, espresso was a thing you could make with coffee machines that you couldn't make with instant coffee from a jar. And espresso was a thing that Sarah indulged in heavily when she first upped and relocated to London. For the first few weeks (until her first paycheck came in and she realized just how broke she was) she indulged in a couple of espressos a day. _And_ a caramel latte or four. _And_ about six cups of coffee from the terribly weak sludge at work. _And_ another four coffees at home late at night while trying to catch up on paperwork she didn't get done during the day.

But, then there was this issue that happened when she managed to get a new job in a better place with a better pay. So yeah, she lost her first job – despite the 18 hour workdays she was putting in. Something about downsizing and outsourcing and all those horrible words that really just meant that you won't be getting an income for a while and good luck trying to pay your bills this month. If not for the aforementioned bills, this probably wouldn't have been such a bad thing – a dead end job in administration for some telemarketing firm that was about to crash and burn anyway, really wasn't on her list of life goals after graduating.

Then, during the three weeks that followed losing her job, there was that panicked flurry of job seeking and job applications and cover letters and calls to people for references and having to borrow money off family and friends just to eat and more and more coffee, because if you don't sleep you, then you have more time to apply for jobs and prepare for interviews and iron clothing and just basically stress out.

BUT, after three weeks of stress and tears and anger and frustration, Sarah managed to find a new job. Well, Sarah managed to get drunk, and then at the behest of both vodka and a certain friend who was in the habit of encouraging bad ideas, she drunkenly applied for a job that she mostly unqualified for, and somehow managed to get it. Apparently art galleries were much more accepting of the drunken ramblings that passed for a cover letter than the other seven hundred and forty billion places she'd applied to in the preceding weeks. But then, quirky is probably meant to be one of the job requirements.

One of the other job requirements – and the reason for one part of the coffee problem – was a full medical work-up. And if you combine more than ten cups of coffee a day with a few weeks of stress and no sleep, it tends not to look too good.


End file.
